


that which walks the earth and sky

by corvidity



Category: Gintama
Genre: Alternate Universe, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Kami!Gintoki, Kami!Takasugi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25645288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidity/pseuds/corvidity
Summary: Gintoki and Takasugi are two exiled, down-on-their-luck gods of war about to receive some divine intervention in the form of two wayward children.
Relationships: Sakata Gintoki & Takasugi Shinsuke
Comments: 2
Kudos: 40





	that which walks the earth and sky

They start fading in the fourth year of the war. Gintoki’s feet are the first to go, passing through the flaking red paint of the torii until he looks as if he grew from it, silver hair and all.

“Don’t laugh,” he tells Takasugi.

“How lowly do you think of me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. This low?” Gintoki drops his palm to waist-height and smirks, then scowls at the dour look he gets in reply. “Come _on_. We’ll be Forgotten soon; you can at least take a joke.”

“Is everything a joke to you?” Takasugi snaps. “Four hundred years of banishment and you’re about to let it end on the back of a couple of shitty jokes when we haven’t avenged Shouyou-sensei?”

The Legion had not looked kindly on the only Elder to stand up for two young and frighteningly strong war gods. _They are unpredictable and savage, too like the humans,_ the rest said. Shouyou had found no fault with that – _as they should be. They embody the best and worst of the mortals, their light and darkness alike. Their connection to them makes them worth our regard._

It had ended in death for him and exile for them, when with all the bellicosity and rebelliousness of human will that had birthed them in the first place, they challenged the Legion.

A shudder travels the length of Takasugi’s spine, forcing him to his knees. He eyes the light passing through Gintoki’s opaque legs with weary resignation. “We’re no good to him like this.”

Gintoki laughs. “Don’t flatter yourself, Bakasugi. We’re both no-good troublemakers. Why else do you think he chose us?”

The days pass quickly after that. Takasugi begins flickering in and out of existence, sunlight now eating at him rather than soothing as it had used to. Also unable to bear too much sun, Gintoki lies listlessly atop the torii most nights, looking out over the weed-choked steps that lead to the shrine. They had both known being Forgotten was a possibility after their banishment, but never cared to acknowledge its reality.

The Elders had chosen the isle well. Connected to the mainland by a thin strip of land only accessible during low tide, and with a makeshift shrine hidden deep in the woods, the likelihood of visitors had never been high. Without the power or favour of the Elders, they had fallen from human sight and knowledge over the years.

It’s only now that Gintoki realises Shouyou might’ve berated them for their arrogance in assuming people would find a way to the shrine. But maybe, he thinks, straining his ears to hear the sea and the sounds of the outside world he had taken for granted, they’d been too frightened to think of the alternative – that they would be Forgotten here alone, unworthy and unloved.

The red-haired, blue-eyed child appears in the clearing the next day. Twigs spring from her hair, grazes scattered across her face. 

“That’s it. I’ve started seeing things. I’m no more for this wor –”

“I can see her too,” Takasugi interrupts. “What’s more, that’s an _Amanto_ child.”

The trees rustle behind her and a boy emerges, katana in hand and a wild, unhinged look in his eyes. Takasugi recognises it instantly, the bloodlust lending his body a semblance of strength.

The girl collapses in a small pile at the foot of the shrine stairs right under Gintoki’s stupefied face.

It all happens rather quickly. “Get the girl,” Takasugi says, and then he has the boy’s wrist in his ghostly hand, battling through a wave of jumbled memories and emotion to get to what he needs most. He flashes past the anger and hatred and grief to the overriding desire for vengeance, _they’re the reason Father died, I wish they were all dead,_ and seizes the thread like a lifeline.

_Then lend me your faith, Shimura Shinpachi, and I will give you what you desire._

In the second before power surges through him, he catches sight of a brighter, more solid Gintoki hovering protectively over the Amanto girl, and then the connection clicks into place. More images, these ones clearer, rise into his mind. A dead father. A warrior sister. A legacy too tall to live up to. So much hatred and fire in his veins that Takasugi feels as though he is burning and drowning before he snaps the thread and feels the boy’s consciousness fading.

Reality comes filtering back in.

“Oi,” comes Gintoki’s voice from beside him. “Are you okay?”

They stare at the unconscious boy, and then at the girl still curled into a stunned ball. Takasugi can hear the ocean from far away and the soft breathing of both mortals; he flexes his fingers and revels in the power he feels skittering along them.

“We both appear to be more than alright.”

Gintoki hadn’t expected to be saved from the most ignominious ending for a deity by two scruffy mortals, Amanto or otherwise, but he can’t complain. The girl, Kagura, is as good a match for him as the boy is to Takasugi. She’d smuggled herself to Earth on a freighter trying to find her scattered family, only to arrive to a war she had been forced to fight in.

There had been anger and fear in her memories, a deep and primal rage that Takasugi would’ve feasted on for centuries, but it had curiously been eclipsed by the depth of her hatred for herself, a deep shame and guilt for her very nature – which had in turn been overwhelmed by an enduring fear of loss. _Why has it come to this?_ he hears her cry again, _I only wanted them all to live._

Gintoki wheels about on his noticeably more solid foot. Never has he been more grateful to get dust on his robes. “You know what this means, right? These kids are now the only thing keeping us here. It’s the middle of a war and we can’t let them die, or worse, kill each other.”

Takasugi, miserable bastard that he is, sighs. “Have you forgotten what we are? We have to let them fight to maintain their faith in us. Even if they do die, they have the chance to pass on our story to others.”

Maybe it’s just the fact of touching a mortal soul for the first time in four centuries, but Gintoki has no desire to see Kagura of the Yato die for the sake of a few more followers.

“War is what sustains us,” Takasugi continues, lecturing like a teacher. “Death is part of war. They know that, and they fight regardless. You cannot control them, Gintoki, or protect them if they do not want your protection. That is how mortals are.”

The girl had made for the shelter of the shrine as soon as she realised she wasn’t in imminent danger of being killed, leaving the boy on the ground. Takasugi pays neither much attention. They are safe here for however long they stay. He is more concerned with the concept of not being gone, of still having a presence and relevance in this world. He’d expected death more than Gintoki – though they’d been born at the same time, their survival had never depended on one another.

Takasugi’s godhood comes from death, the bitter desperation of human warriors hungry for victory. _Kill them all,_ they’d prayed. _Destroy the enemy horde._ That kind of destruction was bloody and glorious but fleeting. Those that Gintoki protected on the battlefield returned to him grateful; life, in the end, was what humans instinctively wanted, not death.

He watches the boy push himself up, confused and disoriented, and on catching no sight of his prey, make clumsily for the trees. Distance stretches the bond but not enough that it snaps; Takasugi senses the arrival of a band of humans to spirit him back into the heart of the war.

The days, and then weeks pass. Kagura finds her way out of the woods and back to her people, unknowingly taking Gintoki with her in spirit. He had not grasped the enormity of the war or the Amanto invasion until he sees it through her emotions; the bottomless bloodlust of her comrades, their single-minded desire to drive the humans, those _samurai_ into submission where they belong. Yet Kagura’s hope burns strongest for peace, its flames so bright the others never fail to notice and mock her for it.

Gintoki discerns from the faint tremors of their bond and the greyer, most listless parts of it that the indifference and scorn of her own people wounds her. He saves these same Amanto anyway, holding their life forces to the earth, because that is what she wants. Though they sneer at her, she clings to them because she has no one else – her mother is dead, her father absent, and her brother wandering. 

But through her, he hurts too. She is a child without a home or place to belong, or people to tell her she is loved and wanted for who she is, not her bloodline and ability to slaughter. He wants to tell her she is keeping him alive.

As Gintoki regains his power, so too does Takasugi. Shinpachi had plunged back into the fight after his rescue with renewed purpose, and through him Takasugi gathers enough bitterness and resentment to see the rivers of blood before they run and then coax them into existence. At the end of every battle, Shinpachi offers his prayers to the force that had told him to have faith.

The thread of his thoughts hums a dark blue to Takasugi, the desperation and desire to be better and stronger giving him the most power he’s known in centuries. To think so much thirst for vengeance could be bound in a mere human boy – it should thrill him, as it used to when he counted children among his followers. More disciples meant more prestige in the Pantheon, and he had been a young god too, not dissimilar from those trying to prove their worth through feats of bloody reckoning.

Shinpachi is a follower any god would kill to have. He is lonely and embittered from being the weaker of his siblings, and perfectly unmoored from the loss of his father to latch onto anything that could offer him strength and therefore validation. But as Takasugi came to terms with his exile and the loss of faith, he stopped taking human devotion for granted. He wants the boy’s belief, but paradoxically, the more he does, the more he cares for Shinpachi’s pain and suffering.

He is sure Shouyou would’ve laughed.

Gintoki goes flying across the clearing in his fox form one bright, sun-soaked morning. The seven of his nine tails which he has managed to manifest twitch, glowing with an inner light that signifies his power. It impresses him that Kagura’s faith is equivalent to at least ten followers – he doesn’t need any more at this rate to sustain him, and it worries him all over again that one day her kindness of heart will get her killed in battle.

“I see you still haven’t learned to groom yourself.” The three-legged crow, feathers preened and beak a dark slash in the sunlight, gives a disapproving caw.

“And your third leg never stops being creepy. Besides,” one tail swats at the crow, which easily hops away, “it’s these split ends, you know? They’re such a pain.”

Gintoki settles on his haunches, and the crow takes great delight in nipping at one his tails. This time, Takasugi isn’t quite fast enough to avoid the mass of white fur that descends on him. “Get your useless feather duster off me,” he squawks.

“ _You’d_ be useless to Shouyou like that.” Gintoki turns his massive head to the pinned crow. “So you’ve still only got the boy?”

“I hardly think you’ve done any better than the Amanto girl.”

They fall silent. It _does_ seem a problem that they’ve failed to grow their followers, and it’s a non-divine miracle that neither has met an unfortunate end. The risk is ever-present, and Gintoki knows that Takasugi knows it too. He lifts his tail absent-mindedly and looks to the torii, a dull flaking red even as the skies are the bluest he’s ever seen.

The boy comes back. The girl too. Unfortunately, they arrive at the same time.

“You!” Shinpachi has his sword out in a blink as Kagura bares her teeth at him, and Takasugi, having just seconds to act, watches completely alarmed as Gintoki swoops between the two children in his fox form. They can’t see him – his power is growing but not strong enough to appear on their plane – but it kicks up a wind that sends leaves and dust flying, forcing the children apart.

“What are you doing?” Takasugi almost yells at the fox that goes flying towards the torii and settling atop it. He is about to yell again when he feels a tug in his bond with Shinpachi. His rage has ebbed, replaced by wonderment and a tinge of fear. He recognises unknown forces at work.

Shinpachi glares at Kagura. “You’re lucky I came here to pay my respects. I wouldn’t profane sacred ground with Amanto blood. But if you get in my way, I’ll only be acting in self-defence.” He sheathes his katana and climbs the shrine steps, and after a moment, Kagura follows.

From atop his perch, Gintoki gives him a foxish grin.

The shrine interior has fallen into disrepair from lack of use and faith alike, and neither deity had wanted to spend time in what felt like a tomb. The fox and crow carvings are grown over with moss and lichen, the altar covered in dust and dead leaves. For a few minutes, the children are too intrigued to remember they are enemies as they explore the shrine.

“I… didn’t realise there were two of them,” says Kagura softly. She touches the drawings that show the benevolent fox god raising warriors aloft on its tails, beside the three-legged crow spreading fire and ruin from its wings. Even Shinpachi looks taken aback; Takasugi feels his confusion.

There is no more talk between the children, and they go their separate ways.

They return to the isle every few weeks after that, rarely running into each other. On the few occasions they do, there are pointed glares and an exchange of sharp words, but never violence. Gintoki credits Kagura for the strained peace.

“It’s her nature,” he boasts like a proud father. “She’s much better at self-restraint than your Shinpachi. Now _there’s_ a loose cannon. He really takes after you, all brooding and angsty.”

“I’ve never seen a softer Amanto. It wouldn’t hurt her to develop a ruthless streak like Shinpachi.”

But Gintoki knows ruthlessness doesn’t come easily to Kagura. He is glad of it in his own way, despite his constant fear it will spell her end one day. The battles have intensified, the dead piling ever higher, almost high enough to reach the heavens. Losses on both sides are inevitable, and Gintoki has done his best to keep the ones closest to Kagura alive. 

“She can look after herself,” he says, the words like dust in his mouth.

As a lull in the fighting takes hold, Shinpachi starts coming to clean the shrine. Though Takasugi had felt the grief and rage in the boy’s soul, he had seen a glimmer of something kinder beneath it. Something of the boy he’d been before his father’s death, that took the simplest pleasure from the plainest tasks.

Spiders are evicted and cobwebs dusted, years’ worth of leaves swept up and bundled away. It is another form of devotion that Takasugi had forgotten about, and one he doesn’t mind recovering. It soothes the ragged edges of his godhood in a way that pure power does not, and it is better to see Shinpachi carefully prying loose the moss than to drink from his battlefield rage.

Kagura sometimes runs into Shinpachi during his cleaning, and though she claims she doesn’t take orders from him and is doing only what she thinks respectful of her god (Gintoki inflates with pride), it’s obvious when she lifts braziers for Shinpachi to sweep beneath or chases cockroaches out.

“It’s not like I’m helping you,” she sniffs, much to Takasugi’s amusement.

With the altar restored to some of its glory, the offerings begin to accumulate. Whatever understanding Kagura has of Earth traditions and culture is incomplete, but they cannot question her earnestness in the coins, bus tickets, chocolate wrappers and beetle shells that she heaps up beside the more traditional baskets of fruit and sweets that Shinpachi brings. A tattered purple parasol appears one day, followed a few days later by a wooden training sword.

“Oi, are they treating this like some game?” Gintoki prods the parasol, like he can everything that Kagura offers him. If she thinks the lull in the fighting is his doing, there’s no harm in that. “She’d have more use for this than me.”

“That ratty parasol is only good for the vermin; it couldn’t keep out the sun, let alone a downpour.”

“Hm.” Gintoki considers the dented tip thoughtfully. The parasol glows for a blinding second, and when the light fades it looks good as new. “Hah!” he crows, and sprays a line of bullets out the entrance from the umbrella tip. Takasugi chokes.

“Let’s see you do better, Bakasugi.”

“Weren’t you concerned a second ago about them treating this like a game?” But a glow suffuses the bokuto and Takasugi holds it aloft. “Care to spar?”

Their followers don’t need much convincing to take up their new weapons – gifts from the gods are not to be scoffed at. And although Gintoki knows Takasugi would never admit it, it puts him at ease to know that Shinpachi bears a sword blessed by a god.

“Far be it that I would care about the Amanto girl, but aren’t you supposed to protect your followers rather than give them weapons?”

“For a crow, you really can be stupid. You realise your sword only cuts his enemies, right? I’d say you’re the one trying to protect his sole follower.”

“You can admit that you just don’t want her to die,” Takasugi drawls.

Gintoki’s grin morphs into a toothy snout. “Only when you admit the same for yours.” The fox darts off, chased a second later by an indignant three-legged crow.

Spring sweeps the isle sooner than either god had expected, an unseasonable spell of warmth that has pine leaves bursting from their dormant branches. The lull hadn’t lasted long. Blood stains the earth again even as the butterflies dance and Shinpachi’s visits become fewer. Takasugi doesn’t realise he hasn’t thought about avenging Shouyou in months until Shinpachi’s absences give him more time to think.

Even then, one part of his mind is always with the boy in battle, and he refuses to put a name to the relief he feels when a minor injury is enough to put Shinpachi out of commission for a month. In the time before a full recovery but determined not to lie around, the boy travels again to the isle with a bundle of seeds.

Takasugi watches him spend hours planting them around the shrine, frustrated not for the first time that he cannot touch the gentler parts of Shinpachi’s soul.

Sometimes Kagura shows. They seem to have come to an unspoken agreement that the isle is for them alone, and that while they are there no bloodshed is permitted. Takasugi senses that Shinpachi no longer sees Gintoki’s follower as a threat; he tolerates her to the point that he allows her to use a rusted metal bucket to water the seeds.

“It’s not ‘cause I don’t think you can do it with that arm of yours.” She nods at his sling. “I like flowers too. Mamie used to grow them outside our house, but Kamui would never water them when it was his turn.”

“I don’t care,” grumbles Shinpachi, but he trails after her as she continues watering.

Sometimes the children turn up and do nothing save taunt each other, like kids should. Takasugi finds himself dozing off in the sun most days when they argue, and Gintoki will laugh himself tired at their antics, sunlight catching on his silver hair.

Though the shrine has regained much of its colour and splendour, Shinpachi and Kagura bring no more human followers with them. Takasugi doesn’t think he needs any more. One is plenty. One is more than what he had before, and second chances don’t come easily to deities like them.

Takasugi doesn’t have any theory on why two children are not only keeping them alive but helping them thrive. He spends afternoons watching over the flowers Shinpachi planted and that Kagura had watered, all of them blooming vividly. Maybe it’s because they’re children in wartime who have few others to turn to, and instead focus their energies on the invisible beings who, to them, are listening when no one else does.

Takasugi wants the war to end.

Kagura brings a bedraggled brown puppy to the shrine one day. She calls it Sadaharu and asks her patron god to “look after him”, leaving a dumbfounded Gintoki in her wake.

“I’m a fox,” he protests. “This is a _dog._ ”

“Well observed,” Takasugi snipes. “You could teach it a thing or two about grooming.”

“I’m setting him on you.”

Gintoki had always known animals were more sensitive to the divine than humans, but he had forgotten how much of a handful (and delight) they could be until, having grown bored of a few days of chasing sticks and breaking branches, Sadaharu chases Takasugi’s crow form around the shrine barking up a storm.

“That mutt is a right terror and I completely understand why it likes you so much.”

Safely ensconced in Gintoki’s arms, Sadaharu emits a bark that sounds like a retort. “Who’s a good boy, eh?” Though he supposes offerings aren’t strictly meant for dogs, Gintoki doesn’t think there is anything wrong with letting Sadaharu eat whatever food is left by their followers. It’s what Kagura would want, he reasons, and there aren’t any ill effects.

At least, it isn’t a problem until Takasugi makes it one.

“Was your canine companion always white?”

“Have you ever not been a supremely annoying pain in the ass?”

“Your dog is glowing, idiot.”

Gintoki notices that Sadaharu is indeed glowing. “What did you do to my dog, Takasugi? I swear to the crow god himself, if you’ve –” The light grows, as does Sadaharu, and before Gintoki can say or do anything the glow fades to reveal a giant dog, its ears just scraping the struts.

“I knew letting it eat the offerings was a bad idea,” Takasugi moans. “You’ve accidentally deified a dog, you fox-brained excuse for a war god.”

Kagura takes it much better than either of them expected, growling and wrestling playfully with her now giant pet, a better friend and partner than the Amanto she’d wished to protect. Shinpachi doesn’t take nearly as well to it, but grudgingly accepts its presence when it becomes apparent it won’t hurt him. The sound of Kagura’s laughter around the shrine becomes a welcome refrain.

That’s all Gintoki needs. If she is happy, so is he. 

The war intensifies. More die, without divine intervention.

The sea roils at night, the air rent by the engines of Amanto ships by day. Dust gathers on the altar as outside the world tears itself apart. Sadaharu grows listless without his playmate.

“I’ve always said they’re better at killing each other than we are at killing them,” mutters Takasugi. “They don’t need my help.”

Kagura’s faith still burns strong and Gintoki is grateful for it, and her. Even the ones who used to jeer at her are more subdued now, the cost of the war taking its toll. She soldiers on, made of nothing if not pig-headed stubbornness and reckless disregard of common sense, things that Gintoki recognise in himself.

Truthfully, he dislikes violence for violence’s sake as much as Takasugi. They might’ve been war gods in another time, still nourished by the peaks and troughs of emotion only a war can engender, but their years of isolation have eroded their desire for human conflict. The children just make it harder to deny the obvious.

“It’s kind of tiring, you know?” Gintoki stands atop the shrine, peering down to the steps now free of weeds and brambles.

“We don’t get tired or need to sleep, have you forgotten?”

He gives Takasugi a brief glance, who is looking out over the treetops to the silvery shine of a calm and quiet sea. Looking, perhaps, for Shinpachi. “You might’ve forgotten too.”

The tide of the war changes ever so slightly; Takasugi’s sensitivity to destruction and death now as astute as it’d been in his heyday. Something, or someone, has entered the fray.

Gintoki takes a deep breath, eyeing his fellow war god apprehensively. “You smell it too, huh? Some foul and unnatural stench.” Unspoken between them is concern for their followers. Takasugi can already feel Shinpachi’s uneasiness. A dark, rippling stain intrudes on his senses, blocking everything else out.

“What –?”

The pain of a four-hundred-year-old memory he hasn’t revisited since the day of their exile tears through him. “Gintoki, do you feel that? Is it… it can’t…” An imprint they’d thought long gone, scattered to the four winds.

“I don’t believe it.” Gintoki’s lips hardly move.

The stain spreads. On the mainland, the loss of life is so great that Gintoki can do little to stop it. Neither of them can reconcile the being that was Shouyou with this twisted mockery of his power, tainted and cruel. He’d loved humans and humanity; he had loved _life_ above all, and Takasugi refuses to believe the stain could be the Elder that had defended them.

It’s Kagura, in the end, whose encounter with him confirms their worst fears. Gintoki collapses one night, Sadaharu’s yipping loud enough to bring Takasugi running. His friend’s face is pale and sallow. “She’s been injured,” he rasps. “I tried… I tried to save them, her comrades; I could barely keep her from meeting the same fate.” Shadows pool in his eyes. “It’s him, Takasugi.”

If Gintoki can’t keep his own Yato follower safe, Shinpachi doesn’t stand a chance.

Still weak, Gintoki can only squeeze his hand. “She’s calling for me. We need to go, we’re _needed,_ can’t you feel Shinpachi calling to you too?”

Tendrils of cold, dark fear thread into Takasugi’s bond with the boy. His thirst for vengeance is the strongest it has been, and though Takasugi near trembles from the power it gives him, terror claws at his insides in a way that it hasn’t for centuries. He hadn’t wanted this. Hadn’t foreseen this.

Gintoki glares at him. A little colour has returned to his cheeks. “Isn’t it about time we got out of here?”

Leaving is a surprisingly simple matter. Their power has grown beyond the strictures imposed by the Legion, and a deified dog helps matters. As they eat up the distance to the stain once called Shouyou, Gintoki has enough mind to find the irony in their failure to leave the isle when they’d gained the power to long ago. It hadn’t been vengeance for Shouyou they’d been waiting for. It was the children.

The thing wearing Shouyou’s face leers at them from behind a black mask. Its presence jars so much Gintoki’s jaw aches. He snaps his teeth, all nine tails bristling.

“Come now, is that any way to greet the old one who gave up his life for you?”

From atop his head, the crow steps into a man. “You aren’t Shouyou.”

“But I am.” The stain spreads his arms as if to embrace them, a dark and hollow void. “And he was me. You remember a god in whose footsteps life followed, but such gifts are never so singular. I am the creature he sought to quell because he feared what I – what he – could do.”

“You’re an abomination,” Gintoki spits.

The stain looks down at them. “Wasn’t it you lesser beings that wished for the war to end? Should you not rejoice for my coming? My purpose here is to end it all.”

Gintoki knows Takasugi well enough that he races forward in time to scoop the enraged crow out of harm’s way, just before he leaps at the dark creature. His jaws close around air. He whirls around to try again, but the thing wearing Shouyou’s face is gone. Just then, his bond with Kagura trembles.

_“No,”_ Takasugi breathes, and then they are gone too.

Clouds blot out the sun and the crow god sucks whatever light is left into his being, standing on the cliff edge before a sprawling army of samurai and Amanto. An army that Takasugi knows contains Shinpachi and Kagura, foolish enough to face down a thing they don’t understand.

“You ready?” Gintoki’s voice rumbles, his tails fanning out. Takasugi caws and Sadaharu barks, and then the ground gives way for them. All the humans and Amanto can see is a massive white fox, red eyes alight with primal rage and claws gouging the earth as it hurtles towards the darkness they have assembled to fight, a three-legged crow sweeping the skies above it, wings spread so wide it could touch both sides of the army.

Takasugi feels wondrous and frightened eyes on them, the awe and terror of thousands flooding into his mind and lending him power. He does not care for them. He cares only for the dark blue strand singing the loudest, the recognition in it; the fervent belief that he is here to help them win eclipsing the fear of the stain.

The contours of Gintoki’s presence brush up against his, solid and reassuring.

_You’re never going to needlessly lose anyone again,_ he hears through the bubble, just as they collide with the diseased creature that is neither Amanto nor human.

And that is how the war ends.

It’s… cold. He isn’t supposed to feel cold. Or wet and muddy. Takasugi cracks one eye open and is greeted by the sight of a very familiar human.

“Are… are you alright, sir?” Shinpachi asks. Rain is falling and Takasugi has never felt more disgustingly damp or thrilled. His limbs are heaving and aching and the pain will be ferocious when he does get up, but he grasps the offered hand without a second thought.

“Hello, Shinpachi.” _Thank you for being alive._

Somewhere behind him he hears Gintoki’s muttered curses as Sadaharu noses him, Kagura’s plaintive voice turning to shrieks of joy, “you’re okay!” There are disbelieving murmurs around him from humans and Amanto, but the rain drowns them out.

“Are you the god I’ve been praying to? I felt… I don’t know how to explain it, but I just knew it was you when I saw that crow come down.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Wait, you’re real?” Kagura is saying, clinging to Sadaharu and looking back and forth between them. “You can’t be gods or whatever, you stink way too much, and –” she points, almost accusingly, at the nest of Gintoki’s hair, “real gods don’t have a permanent perm.”

Which is of course the exact moment the skies open and spears of light strike the ground. A legion of voices speaks: _Takasugi Shinsuke and Sakata Gintoki, you are commanded to appear before the Legion for judgement._

“Judgement?” Frowning, Shinpachi cranes his neck up. “What does that mean?”

“Long story.”

“Oi!” Kagura yells with all the brazenness Takasugi has come to expect (and grudgingly admire) of Gintoki’s follower. “What are you going to do to them?”

The voices ignore her. _You have killed one of us without permission. You will be judged._

He can still count on rank hypocrisy from the Legion, that much hasn’t changed in four centuries. To his side, Gintoki snorts. “Typical.”

“Wait a minute,” Shinpachi yells. “They just saved our lives and ended the entire war. Unless you’re going to reward them, there’s no need for judgement.”

It’s mildly alarming and amusing to Takasugi how voraciously the children mount a defence of two gods they hadn’t seen until now, the rising fury in Shinpachi a sight to behold. Mortals arguing with gods who think of them as nothing but fodder. They don’t even know the atrocities he and Gintoki have been responsible for, the long trails of death and lives saved only to be extinguished later.

The war here might be over, but there is always a war or some fight in the Pantheon, whether it be for power or favour or human devotion. He should thrive off conflict in either world; it’s the entire reason for his existence, and yet he feels nothing for it. Maybe it’s Shinpachi’s influence or the years in exile, but Gintoki was right. He _is_ tired.

He doesn’t feel himself fading until frightened eyes peer into his own. A warm hand holds his wrist.

“T-takasugi-sama, what’s wrong? You’re going see-through.”

Gintoki looks over then, a soft and almost sad smile of understanding on his face. Their purpose as gods has been fulfilled, and the goal they’d clung to is no more. Judgement was passed long ago, not by the Legion but by themselves as they grew to care for the children. A world without war is one in which Kagura and Shinpachi (and their new dog god) can live.

“Wait, wait, wait, you can’t go!” Kagura reaches for, and through him.

“Don’t worry,” Gintoki whispers. “You’re going to be just fine.”

_Let’s go home, Bakasugi._

Light grows and twists in the darkness, coalescing into two orbs. Written into them was faith and foolishness, all the belief of people who had nothing else to believe in. The orbs flash red, then blue, and whatever is left of Gintoki and Takasugi trembles violently. All it takes is one, maybe two, to believe just in them. To want them to stay.

There are no more calls for death or vengeance; there are no people in all the worlds that two children want to save more than the gods who gave them shelter and a home, a place far from the fighting.

They fall into a pool too deep to frighten them for its endlessness, because they know what lies in it, and it is warmth and family and belonging all the way down. They keep falling right from the sky, limbs askew and hair unkempt, straight onto the ground in front of two crying children.

Gintoki doesn’t realise he is hugging them all (Sadaharu too), gratitude and love wound around his bond with Kagura. Not her fear, he thinks. There is none of that anymore, only the fiercest desire to protect, anchoring him to the ground. Her joy surges through him. 

It startles Takasugi to feel in full the gentlest parts of Shinpachi’s soul, the determination and quiet strength that had lain beneath the rage like dormant seeds that had needed just a little coaxing.

“What… what are we now?” he asks, dazed. His divinity runs through him clear as daylight and fresh as cracked pine needles, but they are not gods of war.

“Does it matter?” Gintoki asks. “We’re all here, together.”

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this was sparked way back in 2018 when I was in Japan (remember international travel?) and visited Amanohashidate. The isle is based on it but the shrine and everything else is drawn from my imagination.


End file.
